History books of the year

Dominic Sandbrook gallops through the best of the year's history books,
ranging from the splendour of Byzantium, through the Middle ages and a
history of Christianity, right up to modern Britain

By Dominic Sandbrook

12:47PM GMT 26 Nov 2009

The recession has not been kind to history publishing. Far fewer books are being published than a few years ago, academics complain that publishers are no longer interested in unfamiliar topics and the bestseller lists are dominated by a handful of familiar names. “Only big subjects and popular writers are seen as viable,” complained the eminent medievalist Richard Barber a few weeks ago. “The middle ground, where so much excellent work used to appear, has vanished.”

Thankfully, though, a few jewels still glitter amid the gloom. The first book I read this year, for instance, Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: a History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (Allen Lane, £35), is a marvellously compendious history of the Dark Ages, taking in everything from the splendour of imperial Byzantium to the violence of the first Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It might be a bit more demanding than the typical history book – hardly surprising, given that its author is a professor at All Souls, Oxford. But if publishers can still give us something as intellectually bracing as this, they must be doing something right.

This has been a good year for medieval history, perhaps because tales of the Middle Ages have a greater resonance when we are all watching the pennies, shopping locally and rebelling against our rulers. Medieval insurgents dominate David Horspool’s The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, from the Normans to the Nineties (Viking, £25), a wonderfully old-fashioned narrative in which few pages pass without somebody losing his head to a masked axeman. There is plenty more bloodshed, too, in Jonathan Phillips’s Holy Warriors: a Modern History of the Crusades (Bodley Head, £18.99), a terrifically entertaining account of the Crusades. And there is even more in the latest volume of Jonathan Sumption’s magnificent epic history of the Hundred Years War, Divided Houses: the Hundred Years War III (Faber, £40), which positively overflows with rape and pillage.

In fact, the Hundred Years War is so popular these days that it cannot be long before Andrew Roberts takes on the Battle of Crécy. In the meantime, readers should enjoy Ian Mortimer’s 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory (Bodley Head, £20), a colourful account of Henry V’s road to Agincourt. And Juliet Barker takes the story to 1450 in her compelling Conquest: the English Kingdom of France, 1417-1450 (Little, Brown, £20), which tells how England threw away Henry’s legacy in a sorry tale of lost battles, political bickering and financial mismanagement. Plus ça change, indeed.

By comparison, the early modern period has been oddly moribund this year. The prospect of more books on Tudor queens fills me with utter gloom, but Robert Hutchinson gives us a thoughtful sideways view onto 16th-century court politics in House of Treason: the Rise and Fall of a Tudor Dynasty (Weidenfeld, £20), a fascinating account of the Howard dynasty. And moving forward slightly, I loved Peter H Wilson’s giganticEurope’s Tragedy: a History of the Thirty Years War (Allen Lane, £35). A thousand pages long, with 25 battle plans, section titles such as “Ferdinand Gathers his Forces”, and blow-by-blow accounts of events like the Uskok War and the Battle of White Mountain, this is wonderfully sweeping stuff.

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Meanwhile, Jenny Uglow takes a very different approach to 17th-century history in her terrific A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration (Faber, £25), which uses the image of the card game to frame a fabulously rich and insightful account of Charles II during the first decade of the Restoration, taking in everything from high fashion to the politics of the London mob. And since she admits that her sympathies lie with “the radicals and artisans protesting against abuse of power”, she would doubtless enjoy Edward Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain (Little, Brown, £25), a hugely impressive journey from Lollards and Levellers to Chartists and Communists, written with a lovely eye for detail and sense of the absurd.

Although the Georgian era rarely gets the attention it deserves, one book stands out. Amanda Vickery’s Behind Closed Doors: at Home in Georgian England (Yale, £18.99) not only revels in the details of domestic life, it also offers a very funny way of looking at otherwise familiar historical characters. Whoever would have guessed that the Duke of Cumberland, the Butcher of Culloden, had such an eye for a well-turned vase?

There are not many vases, though, in Dominic Lieven’s account of Russia Against Napoleon: the Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 (Allen Lane, £30), a kind of historian’s version of War and Peace, only without the peace. This is military history of a high order, plunging us into a world of dashing dragoons and bristling moustaches, in which the largest army ever assembled came to grief in the snow outside Moscow. And neither are there many vases in Tristram Hunt’s The Frock-Coated Communist: the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Allen Lane, £25), an evocative account of the life of Marx’s great collaborator, who combined an unsuccessful career as a revolutionary with a successful one as a Manchester industrialist. Charged with hypocrisy, Engels had the perfect answer: “I don’t give a damn.”

Not surprisingly, the 20th century dominates publishers’ lists. Historians seem to be running out of things to say about the world wars, though that hasn’t stopped them from trying. One of the best accounts comes in Miranda Carter’s The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One (Fig Tree, £25), which presents the turbulence of the century’s opening decades through the eyes of George V of England, Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany, sketching their characters with rare style and sympathy.

The Second World War, meanwhile, gets yet more attention from Antony Beevor, whose D-Day: the Battle for Normandy (Viking, £25), which emphasises the slaughter and sacrifice of the Allied troops, will surely stand as the definitive account for years. And as usual there are plenty of books on Churchill, by far the best being Max Hastings’s refreshingly clear-eyed and imaginative Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord,1940-45 (HarperPress, £25). Churchill, Hastings concludes, was “the greatest actor upon the stage of affairs whom the world has ever known”. That should be the last word; no more books about him for a while, please.

Modern Britain, meanwhile, has been very well served. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (Allen Lane, £25) is excellent, immersing the reader in the intellectual world of the Thirties so that we can almost smell the rain-sodden greatcoats in the dingy tea shops. Similarly, David Kynaston’s Family Britain,1951- 57 (Bloomsbury, £25) is a wonderful re-creation of the mid-Fifties from the Festival of Britain to the Suez Crisis. And hats off, too, to Richard Vinen, whose brisk and bracing Thatcher’s Britain (Simon & Schuster, £20) comes closer than any book before it to a fair-minded account of our most influential modern leader and her enduring impact.

Perhaps the most fitting Christmas present, though, is a book that literally dwarfs all the others. Diarmaid McCulloch’s A History of Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years (Allen Lane, £35) is not only the most ambitious book of the year, at 1,161 pages it must also be the biggest. But from the Gnostics and Bogomils to liberation theology and Vatican II, this is staggeringly comprehensive and powerful. Almost every page glitters with insight, and whether you want to focus your mind on the true meaning of Christmas, or are just looking for something chunky to block out the winter draught, this is surely the book for you.

To order these books, many at discounted prices, phone 0844 871 1515 or go to Telegraph Books